A member of the Anonymous hacktivist group appears to have taken down GoDaddy with a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The widespread issue seems to be affecting countless websites and services around the world, although not for everyone.

Godaddy.com is down, but so are some of the site’s DNS servers, which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more. It’s currently unclear if the servers are being unresponsive or if they are completely offline. Either way, the result is that if your DNS is hosted on GoDaddy, your site may also look as if it is down, because it cannot resolve.

Here’s the tweet that started it all, courtesy of AnonOpsLegion, which has some 3,900 followers on Twitter:

AnonymousOwn3r is claiming sole responsibility for the attack, which is why we haven’t seen this tweeted out by much bigger Twitter accounts such as YourAnonNews (over 628,000 followers) or AnonOps (over 299,000 followers). Either way, this is being done under the “Anonymous” name even if the main communication channels aren’t being used to announce it (though I’m pretty sure they will catch on soon enough).

I first saw this problem when Convo stopped working for me, ironically stopping me from communicating with The Next Web staff and getting this story out quickly. The service isn’t down for my colleagues, however, which shows just how erratic the problem is.

This tweet, which was retweeted by AnonOpsLegion, sums up the situation perfectly: